Ship assignment with hub and spoke constraints

• Autor(a) principal: Mourão, M. Cândida
• Data de Publicação: 2001
• Outros Autores: Pato, Margarida Vaz, Paixão, A. C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/27900
• topic: Shipping Economics Transport; Technological Development; Decision - making Process; Routing Strategies; Integer Linear Programming Models

As the shipping industry enters the future, an increasing number of technological developments are being introduced into this market. This has led to a significant change in business operations, such as the innovative design of hub and spoke systems, resulting in cargo consolidation and a better use of the ship’s capacity. In the light of this new scenario, the authors present a successful application of integer linear programming to support the decision-making process of assigning ships to previously defined voyages - the rosters. The tool used to build the final models was the MS-Excel Solver (Microsoft1 Excel 97 SR-2, 1997), a package that enabled the real case studies addressed to be solved. The results of the experiment prompted the authors to favour the assignment of very small fleets, as opposed to the existing high number of ships employed in such real trades.